20.2.19

[ad] #foodsavvy Our journey with food waste in February so far

So I guess I've learnt in this challenge that if I'm set a challenge I tend to skip the "do as your normally do" and try to get as far into it as possible.
Which ends up not getting the results you expected, in some ways.

Our first part of the challenge was to look at our food waste in a normal week. I kind of broke the rule a little by completely getting rid of all food in our fridge and our freezer that I knew would never get eaten, or that had been in there for a while and seemed pointless to keep hold of.
It obviously created a lot of food waste for that week. I ended up with a deep drawer in the freezer that was empty and half of another drawer. It helped to organise the freezer, to organise a drawer for vegetables, desserts, and fish fingers/chicken nuggets/chips/waffles.
We then had a drawer empty to fill with any leftovers we had throughout the following weeks.

The fridge was the worst part, in terms of what I was throwing out.
Mostly out of date yogurts, soggy bags of lettuce and kale, packs of cocktail sausages which were dried up and still three quarters full, and bacon which was dried up as we hadn't wrapped it up properly.

Going through the food cupboard wasn't so bad, just throwing out 3 boxes of cereal that were out of date or had dried up where the bag hadn't been tied up at the top.

I also had a lot of bits that I had forgotten about and as a result, decided to make sure I used those the couple of weeks following. Tins of tomato soup seemed to overwhelm one of my cupboards, but these became my lunch at work so not only was I using up items from my cupboard, reducing waste, I was also saving money as I didn't then feel the need to go to the supermarket and spend £3.50 on a meal deal.

So in terms of waste, ok I did overdo it as I had a massive clear out and it's not a realistic example of our weekly family food waste, but its proof of where we/I need to make changes and be more aware of our food hoarding and of actually staying on top of the food we have in our cupboards, fridge and freezer.
This is, hopefully, where meal planning and focusing on leftovers will really help our food situation.